Somewhere Beneath Those Waves (22 page)

But Francis was waiting. After a moment, Harriet managed to say, her voice only slightly unsteady, “Thank you, Francis, but I think maybe we’ve had enough for the night.”

“You’re sure, Miss Harriet?” He leaned a little closer and whispered, “He likes you.” Then he straightened, looking around the circle again. “Are you sure, pretty ladies? No more—”

He stiffened suddenly, his hand clamping down on Harriet’s; from the gasp, she thought the same thing had happened to Claudia. “There is another spirit.”

If Harriet had not been so disconcerted, first by her father’s return and then by that whispered confidence, she might have been able to stop the séance simply by freeing her hand from young Mrs. Latham’s. She wondered, later, if it would have done any good, or if it had already been too late.

The younger Mrs. Latham said, by rote, “To whom does the spirit wish to speak?”

“Mrs. Esther.” Francis’s voice was shaking and shrill.

“I am here,” said old Mrs. Latham. Her expression was sneering, and Harriet knew she still thought this was just an act.

“Mrs. Esther, be careful,” the child moaned, and then he was gone.

“So you married that moron Latham, did you?” said a new voice, a young woman’s voice, merry and light. “Oh, how the mighty are fallen. I’d have thought, once you got me out of the way, you’d at least have landed that poor chinless viscount. What was his name?”

“Who are you?” demanded old Mrs. Latham.

“Oh come now, Esther,” the young woman said with a trill of laughter. “You know who I am.”

“Dr. Venefidezzi,” old Mrs. Latham said, “I insist that you stop this nonsense at once.”

“He can’t, Esther. I’m afraid I’ve frightened his control. I can’t imagine why.” She smiled with Dr. Venefidezzi’s face; while her voice was light and charming, the effect of the smile was grisly, like the rictus of a skull.

Mrs. Latham pulled her hands free with an angry snort, her granddaughter on one side and her daughter-in-law on the other uttering identical gasps of protest.

“Don’t be silly, Esther. It seems as if I’ve been waiting forever for this chance to talk to you. You don’t think I’d let some silly medium’s silly mumbo-jumbo get in my way, do you?” She let go of Harriet’s and Claudia’s hands and held her own up, laughing again.

“What do you want?” old Mrs. Latham said.

“Revenge, darling, revenge. Shall I tell your granddaughters what you did? Shall I tell them about their Great-Aunt Enid?”

“I don’t know what you’re talking about, and I think this joke is in exceptionally bad taste.”

“You always
were
pig-headed. She murdered me, my dears. Poisoned me. What was it, Esther? I’m afraid I never had the faintest idea. Arsenic? Strychnine? Deadly nightshade?”

“I don’t know what you’re talking about,” Mrs. Latham repeated obdurately.

“Dr. Venefidezzi,” said the younger Mrs. Latham, “I really think this has gone far enough.”

“And I’m sure Dr. Venefidezzi agrees with you,” Enid said. “But the matter is no longer in his hands. I have been waiting to have this conversation with my sister for forty-five years.”

“I have nothing to say to you,” old Mrs. Latham said, getting up. “Cecilia, if you pay this man, you’re a bigger fool than I take you for. Come, Harriet.” She left the room as magnificently as a man o’ war under full sail.

“I hope her pig-headedness isn’t hereditary, or you’re going to have an awful time marrying those girls off,” Enid said to the younger Mrs. Latham. “Don’t worry. My business is with Esther, not any of you.” And she was gone. Dr. Venefidezzi fell forward across the table, his head narrowly missing the blue bowl. And, perfectly predictably, Virginia Latham went off in strong hysterics.

The séance was over.

The medium had fainted, Harriet was told by Wilson when she brought the tisane that Mrs. Latham claimed kept off her “spasms.”

“Out cold,” the housemaid said, her air of concern marred by the ghoulish delight in her voice. “They thought he was faking—Mrs. Cecilia said that was all his séance was, parlor tricks and such—but he wasn’t. Mr. Latham told Jasper to go fetch the doctor.”

Mr. Latham, Harriet reflected, taking the tisane to old Mrs. Latham, had the virtues of his defects. Cold-blooded, phlegmatic, and unimaginative, but he did not lose his head in a crisis, nor ever doubted the right course of action. She tried not to imagine how they might have “proved” that Dr. Venefidezzi wasn’t faking, and felt sick and cold.

It had taken over an hour to pacify Mrs. Latham. The old lady was not, so far as Harriet could tell, in the least frightened; she was enraged, accusing the medium of prying and meddling and mockery. Harriet was not quite sure what it was that Dr. Venefidezzi was supposedly mocking, but she knew better than to ask. She said nothing but, “Yes, Mrs. Latham,” and “No, Mrs. Latham,” cramping her fear and grief and worry—her self—into a box as small and dark as a coffin.

You have nowhere else to go, she said grimly to herself, just as you have had nowhere else to go any time these past five years. Nothing has changed.

But something had. When Harriet was finally able to escape from Mrs. Latham, she went up to her small, drab room, propped the chair beneath the doorknob, and sat down on the bed, intending to calm her mind by reading her Testament—the only book she could own in Chisholm End without questions and disapproval and Mr. Benfelton’s opinions on education for women. She was quite accustomed to opening the limp leather-bound book and beginning to read perfectly at random, a species of
Sortes Biblicae
which had never offered her any insights into either the future or the ethereal plane. But this time, the book fell open and Harriet stared at the page without reading it, her mind full of crimson and gold dragons, of an ugly little man smiling at her, of a dead child’s voice whispering,
He likes you.
And, a nagging thread of disquiet, those terribly specific facts offered by something that claimed to be Esther Latham’s long dead sister. Harriet knew all about Mrs. Latham’s viscount; he had been carried off by a pleurisy of the lungs before he ever actually breathed a word of devotion or commitment (or even, from what Harriet could tell, inclination), but it was accepted family history that Claudia and Virginia had almost been descended from a viscountess. Mrs. Latham hadn’t mentioned the lack of chin.

Harriet thought, coldly, If Dr. Venefidezzi wasn’t faking, then he was telling the truth.

Decisively, she smacked the Testament down on the bedside table, bounced off the bed in an unladylike fashion, swung the chair aside, and went back downstairs. She pretended to herself that she was on an errand for Mrs. Latham—a story which no one in the Latham household would dare to disbelieve—and walked briskly into the library as if she had every right to be there.

It was deserted; from the noise, she guessed the center of the crisis had moved belowstairs, with an outpost in Virginia Latham’s bedroom, where she was doubtless weeping on her sister’s shoulder while her mother watched helplessly, faced with the only problem her iron decisiveness could not solve.

They won’t throw him out, Harriet thought, not sure why she was offering herself reassurance. Mr. Latham sent for the doctor.

She knew where the family Bible was, and knew that it had been the Grimshaw family Bible before it had come to the Lathams. Harriet knelt, opening the glass-fronted bookcase, and pulled the Bible out. It seemed to weigh as much as a small child. She opened the Bible to its flyleaf, where the long decorous progression of Grimshaw ancestors was inscribed, with Mr. Latham, his wife, and his daughters added in old Mrs. Latham’s crabbed, ungenerous script.

Harriet looked at the lines above and found there what she had known she would find: Enid Charlotte Grimshaw, born the same day as her sister Esther, dead at the age of twenty . . . forty-five years ago.

“What was it, Esther?” Harriet quoted softly. “Arsenic? Strychnine? Deadly nightshade?”

She shuddered and slammed the book shut, as if it contained some evil thing which might escape, even though she knew that whatever evil there might be in Chisholm End was already abroad.

The house had changed. It was nearly ten o’clock; there was no reason to be disquieted by darkness. But the shadows seemed too thick, too heavy. After returning the Bible to its rightful place, Harriet paused uneasily in the doorway of the library, and a whispering noise, like the sound of her skirts and petticoats, seemed to run on and on into the corners and there to die in sly susurration. She closed her mind against the conclusions that waited, circling like carrion crows, but instead of retreating upstairs, she went in search of the medium.

She found him alone in the housekeeper’s sitting room, white-faced and wild-eyed. He whirled as she opened the door, and all at once he was clutching her hands, staring up into her face. “Miss Winterbourn, you have to help me. I have to get out of here.”

He was fully clothed, and the doors were not locked. “What . . . ”

“The bowl. I have to get the bowl back, and
they won’t tell me where it is
.”

He seemed half-mad between fear and fury. Carefully, Harriet disengaged her hands and stepped back. “Dr. Venefidezzi—”

“That isn’t my name! Surely you know that isn’t my name!”

“What
is
your name?”

“Far. Far Faithwell.”

“Mr. Faithwell, then, what is in this house?”

“It’s
her
,” he said, for a moment sounding and looking like Francis. “That iron-plated bitch’s—I beg your pardon. The elder Mrs. Latham’s sister.”

“Enid Grimshaw.”

“If that’s her name, yes.”

“Yes. Mrs. Latham’s twin sister.”

“
Twin
?” She’d thought he was pale before, but now his face was paper-white, and his hand shook as he crossed himself.

“Yes. Does it matter?”

“It . . . oh, never mind. I can’t explain. But it isn’t . . . it is not good news.”

“Can’t you do anything?”

“Miss Winterbourn, I am a medium. Only a medium. Not a clairvoyant, not an exorcist. Please, I have to get out of here, but I have to have the bowl.”

Grimly, Harriet throttled the reflexive response of, How can I help? “Why?”

“Why?” he echoed blankly.

“Why do you have to get out of here, and why do you need the bowl?”

“Francis. Francis is screaming in my head.”

Harriet went cold. “Francis? Your control?”

“My twin brother. Drowned in the Thames at the age of eight. Our father was a boatman.”

“Oh,” Harriet said, but it was as if a dam had broken inside him, and the words were pouring out, the Cockney in his voice growing stronger by the syllable.

“My mother had the second sight. Born with a caul. She knew I was like her. She knew what happened when twins . . . when one was . . . She took me to an old woman, older than Eve, I used to think, and she taught me how to . . . how to . . . but I have to have the bowl, or I can’t do anything!” His voice was almost a howl by the last word. He stopped, ran one hand over his face, then said more quietly and with his vowels smoothed out again, “I can’t comfort Francis. And if that girl should happen
not
to be satisfied by her sister’s death . . . I’m the medium, Miss Winterbourn. The circle was broken, and I’m vulnerable to her.”

She understood, although she wished she did not. “Can she really . . . ?”

“Yes. Whatever you’re thinking, she can. Vengeful spirits, unlike most others, grow stronger as the years pass, and that girl . . . ” He shuddered visibly. “If you ask me, it was only a matter of which one of them made her move first.”

“I have to warn Mrs. Latham.”

He grabbed her hands again before she could move. “You can’t!”

“I have to.”

“You hate her. I know you hate her. You couldn’t
not
hate her.”

“That doesn’t matter,” Harriet said, disentangling herself again. “I have to warn her.”

“She won’t listen to you.”

“That doesn’t matter, either. But once I’ve done that, I’ll get you your bowl. I think I know where they’d put it.”

He was silent a moment, eyes shut, forehead furrowed with pain. “I’ll come with you.”

“I beg your pardon?”

“She might . . . I might be able to convince her. I don’t know what she can do, even if she does believe us. But you’re right. We have to try.”

“Thank you,” Harriet said and smiled at him. The smile felt strange for a moment before she realized that it was the first time in years that she had smiled at someone and truly meant it. “This way.”

He followed her uncomplainingly, although he became perceptibly more frightened as they approached Mrs. Latham’s bedroom. At the top of the stairs, he whispered, “She’s waiting for midnight,” so softly that Harriet wasn’t even sure he knew he’d spoken aloud.

She tapped on Mrs. Latham’s door and was rewarded by, “What do you want? Cecilia, I’ve told you before you cosset—”

Harriet opened the door. “It’s I, Mrs. Latham.”

The old lady, sitting stiffly upright in bed, gave her a glare compounded of incredulity and wrath. “What on earth do
you
want? If you want to have hysterics like the rest of the fool women in this house, I suggest you go downstairs.”

“No,” Harriet said and stepped aside so Mr. Faithwell could enter the room behind her.

“
You
!” Mrs. Latham said, with magnificently withering contempt. “How you can have the nerve to show your face—”

“Mrs. Latham,” Harriet said, “he isn’t a charlatan.”

“Don’t be a nitwit, Harriet. I knew you weren’t bright, heaven knows, but I never took you for a prating fool like my granddaughters.”

“Then listen to me. He—Dr. Venefidezzi isn’t a charlatan.” Carefully, she proceeded, “I don’t know if what that spirit said is true—”

But not carefully enough. “How dare you even suggest such a thing! You ungrateful vixen!”

“I’m trying to
warn
you! And if we are to speak of ingratitude—”

“Miss Winterbourn,” Far Faithwell said. Harriet choked on her own words. Mrs. Latham said nothing, silent as a spider waiting for a fly to come too close; her malevolence was like water in the air. Despite that, despite the fact that he was coming apart even as Harriet watched, Far stepped forward and said, “Mrs. Latham, we cannot force you to believe us. But I swear before God that what I tell you is true. That spirit is real. Her anger is real. And her vengeance will be real before dawn tomorrow. I am sorry, but—”